The Present Crisis

Welcome to the start of the third year of Syre Byrd Word Emporium! Birthdays are a time to reflect, give thanks and look forward to the next chapter of life!

This week our contributor, JL Roberts writes a thought provoking article about our Current Affairs and seeks to uncover the lines that have led us to where we are. Enjoy, as we have reading this. Perhaps you do not agree? Think differently? Then tell us why in the comments!

 
This is an attempt to explain the permutations affecting the current crisis between China, NATO, the European Union, the United States of America, the Russian Federation, and the Republic of Ukraine. I will attempt to be as neutral as possible, aiming to explain the different views and positions held by respective parties. There will of course be interpretation in what is said. The more complex a situation becomes, the more debate, disagreement and difference of informed opinion arises. Readers should aim to be critical thinkers who weigh and consider such debates and form their own conclusions based on research and evidence; and should be prepared to change their views as added information and argument becomes clearer. I encourage readers to also consider what role they have in the Present Crisis through the lens of nobility. In a previous article on the Word Emporium, The Necessity of Nobility, I argued that those of us able should attempt to replicate aspects of the nobility of old. That is, “in our time, in this age, it is our personal responsibility to act. Not to save the world by oneself, but to do one’s own small part within the tapestry, within the orchestra.”    

 
What is the background to the current crisis? Two world ideologies formed in the aftermath of World War One. The old aristocracy of Europe had lost its ruling class role, and the upper middle class took over from it. In the western part of Europe American influences were particularly strong, emphasising the political philosophy of Liberalism with its social contract theory and focus on individualism. The dominant form of liberalism became Capitalism, which encouraged individualistic success through careerism and the acquisition of capital. In the East of Europe, the old Russian Empire had collapsed due to WW1. In February 1917 there had been a Liberal revolution to replace the aristocracy, but this liberal movement lasted only eight months or so. The October Revolution led by the Bolsheviks and Vladimir Lenin overthrew the liberals and after a period of civil war began implementing a version of Marxist Communism, forming the Soviet Union (the USSR). Other rival ideologies also emerged in the 1930s, but by 1945 were defeated, leaving Capitalism and Communism as the two great theories of politics. Soon after began the period known as the Cold War. 
 
The Cold War was centred on the two Superpowers: the USA led Western Bloc and the USSR. After WWII they had agreed to form the United Nations (Oct 1945) and subsequently devised a system of International Law to act as the basis for diplomacy and geo-political interaction. This United Nations International Law emphasised the principles of Sovereignty and Non-Interference. This can be misunderstood. These principles were not idealistic but were about diplomatic Realism. They meant that any declaration of war between two sovereignties should not be argued for based on ideological claims or on any claimed moral or value-based superiority. For example, the USA would not be able to justify an attack on the USSR by claiming that Capitalism was morally superior to Communism, or vice versa. Thus “non-interference”. There was little idealism in this arrangement and all sides were aware that struggle and conflict would continue, but that International Law would act as a set of rules to guide that struggle. Subsequently the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in a series of geo-political, technological, and philosophical struggles. Proxy struggles became common, often descending into “proxy” conflicts such as the Korean, Vietnamese, and Soviet-Afghan Wars. The closest such “proxy” politicking came to open war between the Nuclear Superpowers was the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. 

In the early part of this Cold War struggle the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (or NATO) was formed in 1949. NATO was a bulwark, a defence against the raw land power of the Soviet Union’s military. The USSR formed a rival Warsaw Pact in 1955 and massive military power, including thousands of nuclear weapons were assembled by each Pact, assuring Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) if they had a Hot War. After the crises of the 1980s – the Soviet-Afghan War, the Chernobyl incident, and the dispiriting effect of Leninist Communism itself – the Soviet Union collapsed. The great architect of American Containment policy towards the USSR - George Kennan - called this moment the “the greatest bloodless revolution in history”. His view was that the collapse of the USSR was primarily caused by the Russian nation itself, the majority of whom had come to reject Communism. Of course, much historical debate about the causes for the fall of the Soviet Union exists. If favouring the Kennan view, it can be pointed out that he believed that many American politicians and diplomats misunderstood what had happened. They, Kennan claims, assumed that the USSR had primarily collapsed because of American policies towards it; and they then made the mistake of treating the new Russian Federation that emerged after as a defeated rival; or continued to think of it as an enemy.  

Whatever the truth of this what is factually correct is that the age of Two Great Rival Superpowers was now over. One Superpower remained: the United States. The 1990s to the 2010s would become the era of American & Western Bloc Unipolarity and Hegemony in the world. In the 1990s a new set of political factions began to take hold in the USA and become widespread. In the Democrat party the New Democrats emerged, sometimes called the Clintonites. In the Republican Party the Neo-Conservative movement began to become dominant. Both movements argued for a new type of Global order, one which would wield American Power through interventionism and would make claim to America being Exceptional. American Exceptionalism puts forward the view that the liberal values of America are the pinnacle of history, or as Fukuyama put it “the end of history”. Such views about liberal values began to set an extraordinarily complex diplomatic trend in motion. The key moment of precedence was when New Democrat President Bill Clinton began a values-based military intervention in 1999. Clinton persuaded NATO, not disbanded after the fall of the Soviet Union, to invoke Article Four of its founding charter. An 80-day campaign followed, bombing the city of Belgrade in Serbia. NATO’s justification for this attack appealed to the principle of liberal exceptionalism - that liberal values were exceptional, and this could justify interventionism against sovereignties with rival value systems. Under United Nations International Law – the principle of non-intervention - this attack was argued by China and the Russian Federation to be unjustified. They did not accept the exceptionalism view put forward by Bill Clinton and by NATO, nor that Western Bloc liberal values were superior to the values of other countries. They wanted to stay with the United Nations system of Sovereignty and Non-Interference. Another geo-political change was that NATO was no longer simply a defensive organisation in their eyes.   
 
The Neo-Conservatives took this approach even further. Political theorists such as Robert Kagan and Paul Wolfowitz argued for a principle called Unilateralism. They suggested that American Power should be used to directly intervene and reorder the world into a Globalised liberal based values system. Any potential threat to this liberal order needed to be intervened against (they argued), to stop this threat spreading. This geo-political theory led to a series of American or NATO led wars in the 2000s onwards and the Salafist attack on New York City in 2001 (9/11) gave it more impetus. There was a NATO led Afghanistan War (2001-2021), an American Coalition led Iraq War (2003-2011), a NATO bombing of Libya in 2011 with the aim of ousting its leader Colonel Gadhafi, and there was an American led attempt to remove President Assad of Syria from power in 2012 onwards. The United States and the Western Bloc has now solidified this interventionism, exceptionalism, and Global liberalism position as the Rules Based International Order. This Rules Based Order argues for geo-political rules being set by the liberal values of the US led Western Bloc. It says that potential rivals, particularly China, should accept that this is the correct way things should be for the post-Cold War world.  
 
A range of powerful countries have continued to reject this claim by the US led Western Bloc. This rejection is led by the emerging might of China and is supported by the Russian Federation. They both assert that moral claims or value claims to liberalism being “exceptional” or “better” cannot be the basis of diplomacy or respectful interaction between sovereign countries. They want to keep using United Nations International Law, with its emphasis on “non-interference” rather than the Rules Based Order the Western Bloc argues for.  

This brings us to two important years, 2014 and 2015. In 2014 the Yemen Civil War began, with the US and the United Kingdom becoming involved via weapons sales and military advisors. The US and the UK – as mentioned – were already involved in the Syrian Civil War. Their involvement was partly driven by concern about Iran. Iran was an enemy of the US and the UK and was allied to the Alawite faction in Syria (led by Assad). Iran was also friendly to the Houthi faction in the Yemen Civil War. Meanwhile both China and the Russian Federation were friendly with Iran and Russia was directly assisting the Alawites in Syria. In 2014 the United States decided to support the Maidan Coup in Ukraine, which borders Russia. The Maidan Coup was led by pro-Western Bloc Ukrainian Nationalists who wished to become more liberal and aligned to western bloc values. They desired that Ukraine should join the European Union. Some of the Nationalists also wished for Ukraine to join NATO. The Maidan Coup overthrew the Viktor Yanukovych government of Ukraine, which had a pro-Russian position. The Coup took away Ukraine’s neutral status and the new government quickly signed an EU Alignment Treaty. Together these actions sparked a civil war in Ukraine. Very roughly speaking, the West of Ukraine is ethnically and culturally Ukrainian and the majority of Ukrainians in the West are pro-Western. In the geographic east of Ukraine, the majority tend to believe themselves to be culturally and ethnically Russian. In 2014 two regions of Eastern Ukraine declared themselves independent Republics: Donetsk and Luhansk, and then received military support from Russia.  An attempted Peace Treaty called Minsk followed but was not able to be implemented. It should be noted that the Russian Federation then seized the region of Crimea in 2014, where significant Russian military bases were located, particularly Sevastopol. Further, in 2015 the Russian Federation then decided to make a direct military intervention in Syria, helping Iran and the Alawites in the process. This stopped the rebels the United States supported defeating the Alawite Assad led government.  

 Highly complex geo-politics has been taking place since 2014. This would be much to get into, so I will attempt to stick to some main patterns or points. Firstly, it is important to note that the Trump faction caused a great deal of division in the United States from 2016 onwards. The Republican Party began to push out its Neo-Conservative wing. Even before 2014 the Neo-Conservative movement had begun to form a range of think tanks, which began to link with the New Democrats in the Democratic Party. Some of the Neo-Conservatives began to serve in Democrat led governments. For example, Victoria Nuland, the wife of Robert Kagan (instrumental in planning the 2003 Iraq War) served as a key diplomat for the Obama administration. She was one of the important voices arguing that the United States and the Western Bloc should intervene on the Ukrainian Nationalist side during 2014. With the election of President Biden in 2020 Victoria Nuland regained a key diplomatic role and served the United States as Undersecretary of State until March 2024. She has pushed the United States and NATO to give more support to Ukraine and to side with the pro-Western part of Ukraine. Again, her view is that this helps to support the spread of liberal values, which are exceptional and superior to the political values of countries such as China or Russia. This is linked to the Western Bloc’s desire to have a Rules Based International Liberal Order, which they want to China and Russia to agree to.  
 
China and the Russian Federation, as mentioned before, disagree. They also cite the principle called Indivisibility of Security, which was agreed in the post-Cold War period between the Great Powers. This principle, they claim, says that a sovereignty cannot take actions that deliberately weaken the sovereignty of a neighbouring power. Sovereignty does not exist in a vacuum, claim China and Russia. The current crisis is linked to this dispute between the US led Western Bloc and an emerging Eurasian Bloc (Russia, China and Iran) about what International Law or Rules should have primacy in diplomacy; and to their dispute about whether the Post-Cold War order (the US led Unipolarity) should remain. The Eurasian Bloc (still only nascent) is arguing for a multipolar world. The US led Western Bloc disagrees, arguing for the Global Liberal Order “rules based” system to remain. From the US point of view Ukraine should have the sovereign right to join NATO and the Russia Federation has no right to interfere with this choice. Russia, and in part Iran and China, disagree, citing the Indivisibility of Sovereignty principle. Here is a way to try and understand how Russia and China see things. First, they both claim NATO or other Western Bloc military arrangements are a threat. China has a similar view about the United States’ military presence in the South China Sea and other places near China. A further way to picture this non-western bloc viewpoint is to picture a role reversal. Imagine a hypothetical situation where the USA lost the Cold War instead of the Soviet Union. Imagine if the Soviet Union, then began to move its Warsaw Pact alliance westward across Europe and began to do interventions, claiming its exceptional values justified doing such interventions. Picture this alliance asking Ireland to join it, for example, and then imagine if this alliance took sides in a civil conflict in Ireland. Picture weapons and military advisors starting to come in, and so on. This might encourage a country like the United Kingdom to stop the alliance doing this, or even to consider war. Similarly, a Chinese led military alliance which sought to get Mexico or Canada to join it in some capacity might be seen as a direct threat by the United States. The Russian Federation has claimed that the increasing threat of the present Ukrainian government joining NATO justifies their own military intervention. They also claim that the Minsk Treaty not being implemented is the Ukrainian government’s fault and justifies their military attack and intervention. Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian government disagree, saying that they should have the right to make their own decisions about alliances, including joining NATO. Russia in turn cites the civil war in Ukraine and its need to protect ethnic Russians in the East to further attempt to justify its actions.  

 The present crisis is a critical moment in world history, where two blocs are re-emerging. We are seeing a New Cold War. Like the previous Cold War, this raises the question of how countries in the world will side with the different viewpoints. The fact that these great powers have nuclear weapons and own much of the world’s resources has the potential for tragedy. Proxy wars and struggles are returning and smaller countries such as Ukraine are caught in the middle of this type of geo-politics. As readers of philosophy and history we want to understand what is happening and we also want to be aware of the relational dimension, of lives and persons caught up in the middle of these rivalries and the diplomatic chess pieces being played. We want to be aware of the danger of dehumanising all those humans caught up in the conflicts happening right now, the one in Ukraine being the biggest in the news (along with Israel and Palestine), but others like Yemen and Syria ongoing. There are sharp disagreements in the world right now, about rules and laws and what should govern the shaping of the world as it continues to change. As we consider being noble like in response, we can consider also that if we play any part at all, it is to aim for some good – realistically obtained – within how things are.     
  

Want to know more about the historical causes? Two divergent views.  
 
Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands. Professor Richard Sakwa. 

Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. Professor Timothy Snyder.